A few years ago when the Union Jack had to go from the row of EU flags (because of Brexit), my city's council (of the Dutch town of Leeuwarden) replaced it with suitable alternative:
Not OP but also Dutch. Yes I would definitely like the EU to abolish veto powers and move to a majority rule. Europeans are too divided and need to band together to form a realistic opposition to the US and China. Veto rule is no way to govern a large group, since you only have to bribe a single member to cripple the whole. This has been known since at least the ancient Greek citystate era.
Given that the EU has been happy to use America's defense guarantee to subsidize their own defense for a few decades that doesn't exactly ring true. That said, I do understand the need for EU strategic autonomy, especially since the U.S. has been pushing for it since at least the Obama administration but I just found it odd that the U.S. would be lumped in with China. One's influence I'd say is clearly malign, the other often at least tries to be mutually beneficial.
>but I just found it odd that the U.S. would be lumped in with China
When SWIFT was transacting with Iran after our negotiations you forced our hand to fit your own geopolitics.
You force decisions about nato procurement to favour you (At times Germany has done so too tbh) and your industry then whine we don't spend enough.
Whenever it comes down to it your allies end up being pushed to act like vassals instead (see Japan being forced to do technology transfers to the US, to import US goods, set monetary policy favouring the US,etc in the 70's/ 80's all to essentially bail it out)
Then there's various examples of government sponsored corporate espionage.
Then there's things like our refugee wave resulting political turmoil stemming from our dealings in the middle east and the arab spring after north african countries and co tried in vain to protect their pegs against the dollar.
All in all I do think there's countless opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation and alignment between the US and EU but hell don't act like the US is some saint who never acts in it's own interest. At least with China nobody pretends.
Ps. I think the US rethoric regarding china is laden with hypocrisy. That's not to say China is not authoritarian, etc
I mean, has the war in Ukraine not shown that having a strong defense is necessary, even in Europe? If you're trying to point out that there hasn't been a war in the EU while it's been under America's security cordon, point well made.
Point taken on Iran, I understand that was annoying from the EU perspective and potentially an overplay of America's hand; but I guess I just think that if the EU and the U.S. aren't tightly aligned it will open up more potential activities from China who has shown themselves over and over to be significantly worse "partners" than America.
I don't think blaming the refugee wave on the U.S. is fair, there were a lot more factors at play than just countries unable to achieve a dollar peg, besides wasn't a huge amount of the turmoil (at least politically) from the Syrian refugee crisis, not N. Africa?
> All in all I do think there's countless opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation and alignment between the US and EU but hell don't act like the US is some saint who never acts in it's own interest. At least with China nobody pretends.
Of course the U.S. isn't a saint, but it is a country that does actually try to have some values in its engagements. Does it fail constantly or make deals that I think are awful and work with terrible people? Absolutely, such is geopolitics (although we do often have unforced errors there). But it's such a funny way to equivocate-- America does some bad things but is hypocritical but China is just absolutely terrible and has no qualms about it so both are bad? That makes no sense to me.
> I mean, has the war in Ukraine not shown that having a strong defense is necessary, even in Europe?
In 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, NATO declared that Ukraine (and Georgia) will one day become a part of NATO. I read that France and Germany were against that decision for the fear of enraging Russia, but the US forced their opinion. Russia was enraged, and this is how we got to this war. My take from this war is that it's not always a good thing to let US orchestrate the security interests of Europe. Without US forcing their way through that summit, we might not have a war in Europe today.
>I mean, has the war in Ukraine not shown that having a strong defense is necessary, even in Europe?
True but what defines a strong defence is arbitrary. Buying missiles that we don't even have the platform to fire is not (My country can retrain it's anti air capabilities every few years with the help of another...). Focusing on power projection capabilities to go fight in the middle east has different costs associated with it.
The expenses we do are hardly well applied/fitting and often disproportionally favour the US (or other big players as mentioned earlier) as opposed to us.
To then hear someone say we are subsidised by the US as if that spending is some form of charity rather than self interest...
I am sorry but we don't rely on that >10% US spending to keep Russia out of NATO and the only other conceivable potential threat to EU member states is in NATO. What keeps Russia out of NATO are the nukes and/or conventional collective defence paired with having 7 times the population against a country with an economy smaller than Italy. Meanwhile we spent a lot in Iraq and Afghanistan aiding or perhaps if similarly construed :subsidising US foreign interests.
Also meanwhile 99% of the time where i argue with notably left or right wing people apprehensive about supporting Ukraine, the conversation basically get pushed to include that foreign interventionism with the full expectation that I will defend it in the same breath.
If anything needs work it's not our spending like Trump & co cried about. It's our inter EU political commitment against non direct threats and influence.
Example: Who the fuck cares that Germany is going increase it's military budget so much and spend a shit ton on equipment that'll never see active self defense use??
Who cares about that whilst the likes of Gerhard fucking Schröder sit on the board of Gazprom and the country blocks equipment support from for example Spain from going to Ukraine and plays up an almost comical level of incompetence to not deliver meaningful support.
Meanwhile the likes of France and Turkey are supporting opposing sides in Libya where one side has very strong ties to Putin and the other might help Turkey threaten Cyprus's territorial waters or we can look at Hungary and co doing their best to keep the gas flow going.
Hell it's not like LukOil will close up shop here anytime soon either.
And it's not like the US is the adult in the room with all these examples of proverbial headless chickens in the face of the main realistic military threat lest we forget the Exxon deals, the propping up of places like Saudi Arabia as they in turn support Russia, etc.
These webs of self-interests are generally far more orthogonal to our clear and justifiable US-EU shared interests than most of our military spending or lack thereof.
>If you're trying to point out that there hasn't been a war in the EU while it's been under America's security cordon, point well made.
Why would there be a war in the EU? We're not exactly at each others throat anymore and it has it's own mutual defence clause.
Hell remember some of DeGaulles reasoning for vetoing the UK from joining?
>Point taken on Iran, I understand that was annoying from the EU perspective and potentially an overplay of America's hand; but I guess I just think that if the EU and the U.S. aren't tightly aligned it will open up more potential activities from China who has shown themselves over and over to be significantly worse "partners" than America.
Nobody here sees China as partners in the same way outside of loose use of terms like trade partners which gets used for about every country on earth bar maybe north korea.
The US and we also need to realise we need to be a better "partners" than china in many scenarios outside of Europe. Americans especially like to harp on about predatory lending and the US even bribed african journalists to go of on it but at the end of the day China has been a less predatory lender than the IMF and the later is even forced to give african countries more breathing room due to the existence of the former as an alternative. I fully expect that China would be a lot lot worse if faced with less scrutiny and a similarly big ability to force hands. It only cuts it's losses in the face of a worse alternative... Luckily as it is it that competition exists and the US should probably adjust accordingly just the same to the benefit of those in the middle.
>I don't think blaming the refugee wave on the U.S. is fair, there were a lot more factors at play than just countries unable to achieve a dollar peg, besides wasn't a huge amount of the turmoil (at least politically) from the Syrian refugee crisis, not N. Africa?
I don't wish to point it solely on the US. It's just one of many factors but it's just one example of such influence that Americans generally don't consider.
They (as do most) get a dumbed down news image painting a simple story of protests for democracy. Not a nuanced in depth view showing a mix of local nepotism, foreign influences, of cost of living skyrocketing being a trigger point and how that relates US monetary policy affecting other countries stemming from a relationship that has essentially subsidised US imports for decades and is protected by and a core part of it's foreign policy.
With someone who is honest and open about such relationships and what goes on to sustain them i don't have a strong urge to discuss. After all if we can agree on the fundamentals it comes down to a difference of opinion or personal factors that are hard for me to affect. Maybe that is one of my bad character traits.
For example I have someone close to me like that supportive of a seriously authoritarian state...I dislike that but there was never an argument about whether it was authoritarian or the reasoning behind it's foreign policy so...I just leave it at that.
There's no cognitive dissonance tied to someone plainly stating their self interest, selfishness or otherwise limited scope of support.
When someone comes up with a holier than thou attitude and misconstrues the situation in their favour tho it sets me off.
And for the record I don't think the US, Russia or china for that matter are at all alone in this kind of stuff.
Why France and the UK were so gung ho about Lybia deserves some more focus for example. Oil exploitation deals, political self-interests/nepotism and other things not happily spoken about openly are not limited superpowers after all.
>Of course the U.S. isn't a saint, but it is a country that does actually try to have some values in its engagements. Does it fail constantly or make deals that I think are awful and work with terrible people? Absolutely, such is geopolitics (although we do often have unforced errors there). But it's such a funny way to equivocate-- America does some bad things but is hypocritical but China is just absolutely terrible and has no qualms about it so both are bad? That makes no sense to me.
You yourself try to use these things as arguments tho?
Even if the argument is pulled down to that of lesser evil it doesn't really do you any favours (see earlier article about the 1.2 million deaths for one)
Also I don't see those values in it's engagements. Even when faced with a more clearly defined direct opponent of the past in the form of the USSR you don't get to champion certain values as something giving direction to your sides actions whilst at the same time supporting Pol pot, assassinating democratic leaders, etc.
For those who are aware of the contradictions formed it has a backlash effect which is why today we see so many leftists picking unlikely sides or choosing non-alignment even when it does not make sense. See for example the imo silly takes of Vafourakis, Corbyn, melencon, etc regarding Ukraine.
I (and probably the previous commenter) don't want to move away from mutual benefit and interests regardless of all that but we do want more sovereignty.
That's where the US get's put on the shelf with outside forces just like China (which has comparatively less influence).
Nobody likes being in the position of an 80's japan or so because that's not how partnerships work at all.
>One's influence I'd say is clearly malign, the other often at least tries to be mutually beneficial.
A Chinese citizen would say the exact same thing, countries switched out. Both countries do whatever is in their own best interest, it's naive to pretend otherwise. Now what's in the U.S. best interest might have historically been more aligned with the EU, but that doesn't mean it stays that way.
Sure they would, and one country is actively committing genocide and one isn't. I'd say objectively there are differences in the actions a nation takes in its own interest. If there really were no constraints on actions a nation would take this would be a much darker world and I think the U.S. would have taken much more coercive actions against the EU in preferential trade policy and beyond long ago.
The EU has been far too dependent on the US. Just after WW2, and arguably during the Cold War, this was unavoidable, but things have changed. The EU is a lot stronger now, whereas the US is becoming less reliable as an ally; 20 years ago, they suckered the world into two long, harmful wars, there's been a movement towards extreme nationalism, away from international cooperation, and even away from democracy in recent years.
On top of that, there are a lot of principles on civil and human rights that are core the EU that the US doesn't subscribe too; they're still not member of the ICC, they rarely prosecute their own war criminals, use torture, extralegal assassination, and have a tendency to strong-arm other nations, including European allies, into doing what the US security apparatus wants.
Make no mistake, when tensions with totalitarian dictatorships like China or Russia rise, the EU will always jump into bed with the US, because the flawed humanitarian values of the US are still better than none at all, and we're still allies. But the US is not the beacon of human rights and democracy that it once was, or was presented as. The EU should be more independent and champion this values independently from the US. And that should include criticism when the US fails to live up to those values.
Because we have learned the US to be an unreliable partner and a source for most of our problems, several times now. It's time to stand on our own feet.
Most does sound like quite a stretch but to be fair the U.S. has certainly caused some regional issues (e.g. slowing growth by cutting off trade with Iran, electronic surveillance in Europe on allies, pushing EU countries to buy American arms instead of developing domestic industries, pushing for large beneficial trade deals like nuclear plants that benefit American companies). But yes, most does not seem fair either to the U.S. or to Europe which does have some agency.
Don't forget about the countless wars of aggression the US has waged virtually everywhere on the globe in the last 80 years, or the constant 'regime changing' in unstable countries, most of them leading to an endless stream of refugees that end up on European shores.
Right about now, the US was a major factor in Euromaidan, in an attempt to weaken both Russia and the EU (say hello to Mrs. Nuland, will ya?), which directly paved the way to today's Ukraino-Russian war.
Germany is essentially the 'why not both' girl [1]. No worries, those 100B Euros will come right out of additional taxes.
I want to point out that if we wouldn't get involved in foreign wars, we would not need that either. Last time we had a massive uptick of taxes for military spending (in the 1910s), we built a fleet to battle the British Navy (and we're still paying those taxes today).
> With majority rule (size TBD) a handful of countries will ride roughshod over others. Enjoy centrally set tax rates
The currently discussed quorum is 55% of the EU countries representing at least 65% of the EU population. There's a neat voting calculator here https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/voting-system/... where you can figure out how majorities could work or be blocked. It's a pretty reasonable voting mechanism where small countries can block the vote if they group up, but also larger countries with substantial share of the population can as well.
Fact remains that larger countries with larger populations carry a larger weight - but individual countries can't hold the EU hostage any longer (Even Germany with the largest population share can't block a vote alone)
Also, the EU doesn't set taxes. It requires some minimum on specific taxes to prevent a race to the bottom (corporate taxes), but pretty much all taxes are set by the states.
> Are you saying there is a corruption issue right now?
If you have followed Hungary's trajectory under Orban it is pretty obvious that there are corruption issues. Not that Hungary is the only country affected, it's just the most obvious
Yes. My view on the EU is that it is far from perfect but the fact that we collaborate on a larger scale is necessary and we should only try to enhance it. At some point (500+ years?) we should be one planet, that should the goal. (Sorry; I am out-of-this-world-super-left).
I don't think "One huge government" was claimed. The claim was "one planet", which I think more means people should be unified more than we currently are.
One could imagine lots of ways to have a unified planet without one centralized government. The EU is certainly one model you can achieve unification at large without "one huge government" as it consists of many smaller governments coming together.
Perhaps I did misunderstand, I was certainly interpreting it as a desire for concrete change in the political structures of how the world is run rather than a shift in attitudes amongst the people of the world. I'm definitely not opposed to less conflict in the world!
Personally I don't really agree with your assessment of the EU as a form of that though. In this context I would include something like the EU when talking about larger governments (maybe that's not strictly correct, but it is what I had in mind with my original comment). There are of course lower levels in the EU (i.e. the individual countries) but that's also true for many countries with a central government and smaller regional authorities (e.g. London & Edinburgh).
"One planet" is a slogan without meaning because we're already one planet, so the reader is forced to interpret it in the most likely way it was meant - as one world government. The mention of being super left wing, and the context of the EU makes that interpretation far more likely.
"The EU is certainly one model you can achieve unification at large without one huge government as it consists of many smaller governments coming together."
That's not really what the EU is. The EU is a One Huge Government that has taken over some of the powers of the Less Huge Governments that Europe already has. It isn't a talking shop or forum for collaboration. It's a government which creates laws and enforces them. The fact that it doesn't control everything yet doesn't make it not a government, and the EU's core supporters are like ivolimmen - they want one world government and see the EU as a step towards it.
The fact that you derive “one huge government” from “one planet” probably speaks more to your biases than anything else.
There are plenty of models that would allow for a small level of administration globally and local governmental control that is still considerably better than what we have today.
For what it's worth, the UN could be reformed into such a government. The problem is only that billions of people live in dictatorships of one kind or another, and then the world would suffer under the collective rule of the dictatorships.
One world government would be so ineffective, totalitarian and corrupt that it would be in a state of either constant uprising or permanent heavy handed suppression. It would definitely not be "peaceful" except in the sense that an effective police state is "peaceful" because anyone who suffers from it is crushed, before they even get to the point of being able to disrupt the peace.
How would an ineffective, totalitarian and corrupt goverment manage to supplant all the existing ones? I think that if a world government manages to form, it cannot be any of those things. To unite all the peoples of Earth it has to be efficient, democratic, and just.
By exploiting people with views like yours, and by hiding the truth about it's own nature? Look at the EU for an example of how to do this. The hard core remainers are all convinced anyone who doesn't like the EU is brainwashed, racist, stupid or all three but they struggle to keep up in a debate involving the details of what the EU really is and how it works. That's what converted (deconverted?) me: realising at the start that my pro-EU position was based on the sort of wishful thinking your comment implies. It's all about cooperation and world peace, right? Then I listened to the Brexit campaigners and discovered that I had no idea what was really going on in Brussels. It was very far from the friendly face.
Yes. The veto power allowed individual countries to block major decisions. Require 2/3 majorities for important stuff if you want but requiring all country leaders to agree on everything makes the EU too slow.
Which is going to get introduced because nations like Hungary, led by oil oligarchs connected to Russia, want to fk over whole EU for their personal gain.
You should work towards stronger union not weaken it.
I am a Czech citizen and a mild Euroskeptic. I definitely do not want the EU to become stronger than it already is. We have had enough experience where obsession with "more power" leads, and I do not want to see this scenario replayed again in slightly different conditions.
What I value about current EU is precisely that it cannot just squash dissent by force, even from a single country.
That is, for me, a feature, not a bug. Consent is a great thing.
Many people of smaller nations like Czechs, that regained sovereignty after a long period of subjugation to various powers, do not really want to give it up again so that the French-German axis may have their job easier.
Why did they join the EU in the first place then? Was it for the money and having some entity to blame for domestic policy failures?
The last point is what politicians here in Austria like to do
I am not a Hungarian citizen, but I am grateful that Hungary often has enough courage to call nonsense a nonsense and use or threaten with their veto to bring a bit of sanity in the EU.
Heck, I can say that Hungary voted more frequently in my interest than my government.
The EU is frequently used to push some regulations in favour of big corps that would never pass in any of the national parliaments without a big fight. That's why I'm glad that at least someone sometimes can stop this.
> Can you give any example of Hungary and Poland vetoing in good faith ?
Hungary and Poland were the only countries opposing the unlimited migration. Hungary is the only country that pushes back on sanctions that harms us in Germany more than them in Russia. Austria and Netherlands were opposing a huge debt package to fight corona.
> Lately it seems they only cover own ass, while all other states are in agreement.
Maybe state governments are in the agreements, but not the majority of population. In Germany, some topics were truly polarizing, governments frequently voted for topics that had domestic majority against it, and Hungary and Poland voted for what represents the will of German population majority.
On the other hand, in capitalistic economic theory, the only way to get a sane system is if everyone acts only in its own self-interest. Asking humans to do something for "common or higher good" usually leads to one party exploiting the other.
> When only you see a problem its often the case you are the problem not the other way around.
I doubt that in Europe, we ever had that strong consensus between European citizens. It's usually that governments have strong consensus that is not always reflected in the population.
Instead of ditching veto right, I would rather go the other direction, to the more Swiss style direct democracy, where power would be brought back to people, and away from the governments. If citizen could decide on important topics, we would not need veto at all.
> Ps. I say that as a Polish citizen.
As a German citizen, I wish you more power to your citizens, as opposed to EU or polish goverment, even when we have different preferences.
The veto isn't the only, or even the primary mechanism for countries to have a decisive say in EU affairs, the other and I'd argue far more important one is the opt-out. The UK had many opt-outs such as from the Euro, the Schengen Agreement, the working time directive, etc. Denmark also opted out of the Euro.
It's why I felt the Brexit argument about sovereignty and being forced into things was so spurious. The worst example of an EU rule we were 'forced into' I could find was some food labels (which BTW we still use). As long as a country is smart about what it does or doesn't opt into, there's plenty of scope to chart your own course within the wider EU program.
"It's why I felt the Brexit argument about sovereignty and being forced into things was so spurious. The worst example of an EU rule we were 'forced into' I could find was some food labels (which BTW we still use)."
How much did you look? Or did you find examples of rules the UK was forced into and decide you agree with them.
Here's an example of why the opt-outs were never reliable, like so much else about the EU's supposed democratic mechanisms.
When the European Convention on Human Rights was written - with major input from the UK - it was meant as a general statement of principle, and is thus filled with vague and contradictory language. It was never meant to be law. Many decades later the EU decided it should be transformed into binding law on every EU member. The UK and Poland quite sensibly pointed out that this would go badly and it would be impossible to predict the consequences. So they negotiated an opt-out.
The opt-out was called Protocol 30 and is written in the plainest and clearest English the negotiators could write. It even restates the same thing twice "for the avoidance of doubt". It appeared to contain no loopholes. Nonetheless, just a few years later the ECJ passed a ruling that the opt-out was void. They simply annulled it and because EU membership means accepting ECJ supremacy, that was the end of the "opt-out". Overnight, EU human rights law took effect in the UK too: exactly the thing the government thought it had prevented.
To rub salt in the wound, the case before the court was to do with sending an "asylum seeker" back to Greece under the Dublin Convention. This was a now dead part of EU law that stated the country that decides to allow an asylum seeker into the EU must process them. The ECJ decided that actually it didn't like this rule, because it was "unfair", and so annulled that too along the way, with the justification that Greece was such a hellhole it would infringe his human rights to send the asylum seeker back. Again, nobody reasonable saw that coming and the rules as written just evaporated the moment they came into conflict with EU ideology.
The history of the EU is full of stories like this. When you learn enough about it, you eventually realize that the treaties and rules are meaningless. It doesn't matter how clearly everyone seems to understand an agreement, tomorrow they might have come up with some Kafka-esque justification for why it didn't actually mean what everyone said it meant. These changes always seem to be to the benefit of the EU institutions themselves, not the people.
Such a system of government can never be accountable or trustworthy. Law has to be interpreted as written, not simply discarded the moment it becomes inconvenient. As such the Brexit supporters were right to claim the opt-outs were meaningless. Especially given the pro-EU sentiment of much of the establishment.
Hell yeah. Single member states fucking it up over local posturing is a huge defect in the current EU. Getting rid of the veto is a win for democracy. The EU is getting better every day.
It's time they did, I'm sick of seeing my home countries (and other EU nations) government f** over the rest to push some agenda.
Make it a 2/3 majority and the EU is forced to find a realistic compromise instead of an unrealistic expectation of unity. Have you ever tried getting 25 persons to agree on something?
Veto powers are a good thing as long as you don't have too many parties involved. With an EU27+++, they are unsustainable (as seen by what has become known as the Visegrad block).
Don't know why this was downvoted into oblivion. Seems like the point adds to conversation, isn't rude, ignorant, etc. Whether or not you might agree with them.
It wasn't loaded. It was a genuine question. Did it backfire?
I voted remain. But the brexiteer argument was that the EU is NOT just a trading bloc and has conspiratorial designs on further reduction in national sovereignty. Indeed the EU commission are seeking this right now and have plans to campaign for it.
The remain campaigners and media denied this. They denied even that the EU wanted a military.
The responses to my question indicate that these people support further reductions in national sovereignty to be handed over to EUP and EUC. Tax setting powers and foreign policy powers included.
It literally proves the Brexit supporters correct.
Yes, the veto powers are the one thing that needs to go real quick if the EU wants a chance at standing on its own legs on the geopolitical table.
Right now, we have governments corrupted by Chinese influence (e.g. by ports and other infrastructure being bought up in Greece and Italy), by Russian influence (just look at Hungary's Orban blocking EU sanctions) or by autocratic/fundamentalist politicians (Hungary, Poland, very nearly France).
Personally, I believe that the US will again fall victim to Trumpian populism in this year's elections and in 2024 they will either re-elect Trump or someone he has groomed to be his puppet. At that point, the US will cease to be an ally that the European Union can rely on, and we will have to be able to stand up to Russia and China - which is going to be impossible if the above-mentioned member states will always threaten to sabotage anything.
We need an urgent reform of the entire EU foundation: the veto powers have to go, the European Parliament needs the right to initiate laws (currently, only the Commission has that right), and there must be a way to suspend governments that grossly violate core European values.
